NTU DeepSpeed Recruitment Hackathon 26/27

Drive fast. Don't crash.

Write the software that drives a 1/10-scale racing car around a circuit it has never seen, as fast as it can, without hitting anything. Two tracks, two simulators, one problem.

Documentation: https://ntudeepspeed.github.io/Recruitment_Hackathon_2627/

Register your team: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/70KfZ1by9b — registration closes 24 September 2026, 23:59 (SGT)

Submission deadline: 18 October 2026, 23:59 (SGT)

This branch is the front door. It holds the landing page and the generator that builds it — no hackathon code lives here. Pick a track below and check out its branch.

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Pick a track

	Track 1	Track 2
Branch	track1	track2
Guide	Track 1 docs	Track 2 docs
Simulator	f1tenth_gym + ROS 2 bridge	AutoDRIVE — a Unity binary you download
Control	AckermannDriveStamped — ask for a speed	Float32 throttle in [−1, 1] — ask for torque
LiDAR	819 beams, 270°, 25 m	1080 beams, 270°, 10 m, 40 Hz, plus IMU, encoders and a camera
Circuit	icra26, 17 × 18 m, 78 m a lap	ICRA 2026 compete circuit, 6.3 × 18.2 m, 54 m a lap
Lap timing	Our referee, against a finish line	The simulator's own clock
Install	git clone --recurse-submodules	Plain clone, then ./scripts/fetch_simulator.sh

Track 2 runs the compete phase of the RoboRacer Sim Racing League @ ICRA 2026 — the same vehicle, sensors, circuit and devkit the ICRA teams raced. The big difference from Track 1 is the control interface: there is no speed controller between your node and the motor, so closing that loop is your problem.

git clone https://github.com/NTUDeepSpeed/Recruitment_Hackathon_2627.git
cd Recruitment_Hackathon_2627

git checkout track1   # or track2

Then follow chapter 1 of that track's guide.

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The same for both

The full rules are in chapter 6 of your track's guide and they are what counts. The short version:

• Teams of 3 to 5. One team per person. The roster is fixed at submission.
• Register by 24 September 2026, 23:59 SGT — one form per team. You can start reading, and building, before you send it.
• Deadline: 18 October 2026, 23:59 SGT. Late entries are not scored.
• Score out of 100 — 50 for your fastest single lap, 50 for your 10-lap total, both relative to the fastest team.
• +10 s on the lap per collision. More than 10 collisions is a disqualification.
• Ground-truth pose is allowed and recommended. Replacing it with your own localisation earns bonus marks at the interview.
• AI assistants are allowed. You will be asked to explain your code, so do not submit anything you cannot defend.
• Every push races on GitHub Actions and writes the result to the workflow summary.

Judging runs on one machine — i9-14900HX, 32 GB, RTX 5060 Laptop — and times come from the simulator's clock, so your own hardware does not affect your score.

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The documentation site

docs-site/ renders README.md and docs/*.md from both track branches into one static site and publishes it to the gh-pages branch, which GitHub Pages serves.

The prose stays plain Markdown on the track branches, so it reads correctly on GitHub too. The site is a build artefact and is never committed to a source branch.

docs-site/
├── build.py           The generator
├── check_links.py     Fails CI on a broken cross-chapter link or anchor
├── site.json          Landing-page copy — tracks, stats, chapter notes
├── requirements.txt   markdown + Pygments
├── templates/         Page shells with {{SLOT}} placeholders
├── theme/
│   ├── tokens.css     DeepSpeed design system, vendored verbatim
│   ├── docs.css       Docs components, built on those tokens
│   └── app.js         Theme toggle, drawer, copy buttons, scrollspy
└── static/            Favicon, circuit maps, anything else copied as-is

The platform switch

The site carries a Linux / macOS / Windows switch, and every documented command follows it. Two things drive it, both detected from the prose — no special Markdown syntax, and nothing to maintain by hand:

• Any install/<platform>/… path in a command becomes all three variants, and CSS shows the one for the reader's platform. Copy buttons give the right command because innerText skips what is hidden.
• A run of consecutive per-platform ### headings (as under 1.2 Install Docker) becomes one switchable group, and the contents list follows it.
• A heading that names its platforms in brackets — 1.6 Running the simulator on your host (macOS, Windows) — gets a note telling everyone else they can skip it. The section stays visible, because the prose cross-references these by number.

Nothing is rewritten at run time: every variant ships in the HTML, so the page is correct before the JavaScript loads. The choice is remembered per reader, and defaults to the OS they appear to be on. The switch sits in the header at every width, and again in the sidebar, in the landing hero and beside the per-platform sections.

The stylesheet and the script are published under a content hash (docs.<hash>.css). GitHub Pages serves everything with max-age=600, so without that a returning reader could hold a ten-minute-stale stylesheet against fresh HTML — which is exactly how a CSS-driven feature looks broken.

Keep writing the Markdown for a GitHub reader, who has no switch. A line like ./install/linux/setup.sh # or install/macos, … is right there and the site hides the redundant half.

Build it locally

git worktree add ../t1 track1
git worktree add ../t2 track2

python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r docs-site/requirements.txt

python docs-site/build.py --out _site --src track1=../t1 --src track2=../t2
python docs-site/check_links.py _site
python -m http.server -d _site 8000

How it publishes

.github/workflows/docs.yml rebuilds and publishes on every push to main, track1 or track2 that touches README.md, docs/, docs-site/ or the workflow itself. The same file exists on all three branches because GitHub runs the copy on the branch you pushed to — keep the three copies in step.

The job is guarded by if: github.repository == 'NTUDeepSpeed/…', so teams who fork this repository to compete never spend their Actions minutes rebuilding our documentation. (judge.yml is deliberately not guarded — racing your entry on every push is the point of a fork.)

Design

The site uses the DeepSpeed design system: monochrome foundation, race-red #E2342B as the only accent, Anton for headlines, Space Grotesk for body, JetBrains Mono for telemetry and labels. Dark is the default theme.

theme/tokens.css is vendored verbatim from that system — re-export over it to update. Everything in theme/docs.css reads those custom properties and contains no raw brand values, so re-skinning is a one-file swap.

static/favicon.png is the team's own favicon, copied byte for byte from NTUDeepSpeed.github.io (public/favicon.png) and declared the same way. Do not regenerate it — if the team changes theirs, copy the new file over. The mascot appears nowhere else: the design system's rule is that the lion is a logo, not a UI icon, and the favicon is one of the two places it is allowed below 64px.

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Getting help

• Read the troubleshooting section at the end of chapter 1 for your track first — most problems are there.
• Bring the exact error text and what you ran to the team channel.
• Email ntu-deepspeed@e.ntu.edu.sg if troubleshooting has not got you there.

Good luck. Go fast.